Beyond the Talented Tenth: W. E. B. Du Bois, the Hip-Hop MC, and the Reimagination of African American Homiletics 公开
Jefferson, Mark (Spring 2019)
Abstract
This dissertation discusses how the ideological and cultural influence of the concept coined the “Talented Tenth” and made popular by W. E. B. Du Bois continues to influence the academic discourse within African American homiletics. In order to expand beyond Talented Tenth influence, this project invites Hip-Hop culture into a critical conversation with the prevailing homiletic discourse by centralizing the Hip-Hop emcee as a manifestation of a larger African American preacher tradition. This frame provides a more expansive theorization of the African American preacher, which, by nature of its centrality and influence within African American religion, reimagines the theorization, practice, and imaginative capabilities of African American homiletic discourse.
The Introduction and Chapter One provide an overview to the ideological underpinnings that set the stage for the development and propagation of the Talented Tenth within the African American social imagination. This chapter narrates how the ideological concept of the Talented Tenth developed from an idea into a social imagination through the support of private and religious African American colleges in the shadow of the Civil War. The image of the ideal African American preacher would be imagined within Talented Tenth sensibilities.
Chapters Two and Three trace how themes of race, visibility, and representation bundled within a politics of racial respectability shape the current discourse in African American homiletics, and more specifically, in the theorization of the African American preacher, who exists at the center of an unstated Talented Tenth homiletic method. The intervention of Henry Mitchell and his seminal work Black Preaching would indelibly influence the theorization of African American preaching and the preacher figure.
The final chapters extend the African American homiletic conversation beyond its sizeable indebtedness to Talented Tenth influences by offering an expanded theorization of the preacher figure in the Hip Hop MC. Reimagining homiletics begins with exploring areas of imagination and images of the preacher, detecting how the self-understanding of the preacher is guided by metaphor and images. The MC offers new imaginative possibilities.
Table of Contents
Contents:
Introduction 1
Chapter 1. Washington, Du Bois, and the Uplift of Black Folk 27
The Washington and Du Bois Debate 27
The Talented Tenth Idea: A Complicated Response to the
Negro Problem 47
Vestiges of the Talented Tenth: The Formation of the Talented
Tenth Preacher 57
Chapter 2. Detecting the Talented Tenth Idea in African American Homiletics 68
Henry H. Mitchell, the Father of African American Homiletic Theory 68
Emotional Dissonance, Triple Consciousness, and the Politics of
Respectability in Mitchell’s Writings 73
Detecting the Talented Tenth Preaching Imagination in the Literature of
African American Homiletics 87
Reimagining the Identity of the Talented Tenth Preacher, A Womanist
Perspective 109
The Black Preacher and Black Preaching Beyond Talented
Tenth Frameworks 114
Chapter 3. Beyond the Talented Tenth: Ministers, Minstrels, and the Preachers
of the Masses as Homiletic Precursors to the Hip-Hop MC 122
Folk Preachers as Preachers of the Masses 123
Good Folk Preaching 125
The Politics of Respectability in Emotion and Celebration: Ministers,
Minstrels, and the Art of Whooping 130
Chapter 4. Connecting C. L. Franklin to C. L. Smooth: The Hip-Hop MC as the
New Preacher of the Masses 178
The Plantation, the Conjurer, and the Power of Rhetorical Conjuring 179
The Urban Plantation and Hip-Hop Culture as Present-Day
Slave Religion 189
Conjuring the Hip-Hop MC Preacher in Today’s Context 197
Others Plowing the Ground for the Hip-Hop MC Preacher 204
Divine Similarities 208
Walls Up, MC Out 212
Chapter 5. The Preacher as MC: Bearing Foolish Witness to the Talented Tenth
Imagination 217
The Significance of the Imagination and the Role of Metaphor in
Reimagination 217
The Preacher as Witness 223
The Emcee as Bearer of a Foolish Witness 236
Conclusion 250
Bibliography 254
About this Dissertation
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